Muswell Hill

The dinner party from hell is a tried and true theatrical device. Playwright Torben Betts takes full advantage of its potential in Muswell Hill and delivers not only the requisite excruciatingly dysfunctional family dynamics, scathing looks at both well-heeled bleeding liberals, and down-at-the-heels revolutionaries, but a sobering shot at self-absorbed aging thespians as well. Ouch. And while he does it most entertainingly, with a rapier sharp wit, there’s much food for thought here.

The entire play takes place in the sleek, modern kitchen of Jess (Colleen Clinton) and Mat’s (Jason Alan Carvell) flat in fashionable Muswell Hill, North London. They are having a few people over for dinner and when the play starts, Mat is sitting in the kitchen at a table, working on his computer. It is the evening of Wednesday, January 13, 2010 – The day after a 7.0 earthquake left over a million Haitians homeless and killed an estimated 85,000. Jess walks into the kitchen looking at her phone and she says, not looking up, “You hear about this earthquake? (MAT continues typing.) The Caribbean. (MAT continues typing.) They say at least twenty thousand dead. (MAT continues typing.) It’s so hard to get your head around. (MAT continues typing, she texting. After a time she puts her phone away.) So?” And they proceed to have a conversation about what she’s wearing after Mat glances at her briefly.

It will come as no surprise to even the least discerning audience member after this brief introduction to the couple, that Jess and Mat’s relationship is not all it could be. Indeed, we’ll come to find out that everyone who is at this party tonight seems to be holding out for a better invitation, since nobody present can stop compulsively checking their phones and computers for something. Awkward moments are gotten round with the seemingly perfectly acceptable excuse of needing to check one’s um, gesture, gesture. Which frees the other up to do the same. Phew. No need to talk to that weirdo for a while.

Who could be either Jess’ old friend Karen (Lily Dorment), who is a compulsive talker who cannot stop talking about her dead husband Julian. And who cannot, of course, eat the monkfish stew or avocado and prawn that Jess is serving because she’s gone back to being a vegetarian, nor is she drinking alcohol these days and cannot stand mineral water. Or it could be Mat’s old college roommate, Simon (Richard Hollis), who has just moved back to England after bumming around the world since college. Anti-social, combatively leftist, broke and living with his mother, he sees a capitalist conspiracy around every corner. Or it could be Jess’ sister Annie (Sarah Street), a 23-year-old recovering alcoholic and drug addict who has clearly fallen off the ladder, and brought a surprise guest to dinner. Her new fiancé, Tony (John Pirkis), a 60-year-old Shakespeare director and acting teacher she met at an AA meeting. Tony, however, is not quite divorced from, or out of love with his wife yet, but Annie only sees what she wants to see. And what she wants to see is that somebody loves her and thinks she can be a star.

It’s a merry band, indeed, that wanders in and out of the kitchen between courses, seeking to impress and perhaps undress, one another. Director Shannon Patterson does a wonderful job of keeping the pace going nicely through some tricky scene shifts, and silences. She keeps the audience eagerly waiting for the next shoe to drop without ever letting our interest wander for a moment. And the cast rides the line nicely between comedy and drama. Standouts in this tightrope act are Richard Hollis as the self-righteously anti-social leftist who goes from amusing to abusive, and Sarah Street as Annie who starts out charmingly inept as she gives us her overblown Cleopatra audition, but devolves into pathetic, sloppy hysteria as she gets drunk. Colleen Clinton excels as the tightly controlled hostess, Jess, who must navigate the painful evening while not allowing her own secrets to overwhelm her.

Review

85%

Muswell Hill

About The Author

Donna Herman is a native New Yorker and a self-confessed theater addict. It all started in her childhood, which was spent on movie and television sets and in dark empty theaters while her mother, an actress, and her father, a make-up artist and playwright/screenwriter, worked. She knew she wanted to be an actress at 4 years old while on location with her father who was working on the movie “West Side Story.” They were filming the “Officer Krupke” number on the street and Donna was inside the police barricades being helpful and pressing the lever on the coffee urn for the crew. Meanwhile, the kids from the neighborhood were pressed against the sawhorses looking in. She knew then she always wanted to be on the inside. But it wasn’t until her 8th birthday when she saw her first Broadway show, “My Fair Lady,” that she fell prey to her addiction.
Donna went on to act throughout her school career and attended Boston University’s School of Fine Arts Theater Program where she studied Acting and Directing. After graduation, she returned to NYC and began the life of a struggling actress. She was fortunate enough to originate the role of Chang in John Jesurun’s downtown cult serial classic play “Chang In A Void Moon” which performed a new episode at The Pyramid Club on Avenue A every Monday night for almost a year in the 80’s. Many downtown notables were in the cast including Steve Buscemi, Black-Eyed Susan, David Cale, Greg Mehrten, and Anna Kohler.
While pursuing acting, Donna made money by working in recording studios and eventually got hired full time to manage Spyro Gyra’s new recording studio when Julian Lennon was recording his first album there. From there she became the Production Coordinator on the film of his concert tour for his production company. This led her to a job with the award winning audio post production facility where she stayed for 12 years and was the Controller. From there she went to Charlex, Inc. an award winning special effects and design company for the advertising industry, where she was the CFO and stayed for 17 years.
But her love for the theater has never waned and living in New York, she has always been able to indulge it. She has even been called to revise her role as Chang occasionally over the years, the latest for episodes 59 to 61 in 2015. She is now looking to get back to a more creative life and reviewing theater and designing jewelry.